Starting Out for the Difficult

Poetry. Newly available from SPD, STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD (Harper & Row, 1987) was Cornell professor Robert Dana's fourth collection of poetry. He is a writer of strong, rich experience, which spans the city slums where he was born and came of age to the fields and skies and towns of Iowa where Dana lived and taught for many years. Tense to the point of being enigmatic, Dana is a poet whose voice one trusts: what he says he feels is validated by the precision and force of the saying itself. At the time of its publication, M.L. Rosenthal commented about STARTING OUT FOR THE DIFFICULT WORLD: "Robert Dana's new book is dangerously alive with contradictory states of feeling. The poems are harsh and rich at the same time; they're painfully lonely yet manage to share the loneliness."